Wednesday, January 25

anyway, about the art of other persons

I have been reading a paperback two-in-one edition of
Paul Goodman's
Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars. His
assessment of the state & direction of education is bleak. By the mid
1960s, a very particular, rigidly defined form of schooling, most of its
priorities shaped by an ever-increasing mania for standardization and
quasi-scientific assessment, has become the only acceptable way to grow up.
Schools are an enormous and entrenched industry, a set of vested interests
dedicated primarily to their own preservation and expansion — which there
is every reason to believe will continue indefinitely. Forty-some years on, it
seems clear that events have generally borne out his pessimism.

What makes Mis-education a really compelling read isn't so much the
ugly picture it paints of a wasteful and destructive regime of schooling.
After all, plenty of people express a well-founded discontent, and many of them
raise very similar issues. It is rather that Goodman's diagnosis of the
situation is lucid, historically grounded, and eminently reasonable. It is also
unapologetically radical: By the standards of acceptable discourse on education
in this country, both Goodman's analysis of the problem and most of his
proposals are essentially unthinkable. And yet any thinking person ought to be
capable of at least considering his propositions.

An unpleasant truth is that nearly all of the relevant decision makers
— students, parents, teachers, local, state and federal policymakers
— are locked into the current paradigm and its escalation. Some are
wholeheartedly committed to that escalation, and the rest are generally unaware
that there is an alternative. Students are not generally even accorded the
status of decision makers - which surely says something about the whole
process. Engaging with a book like this one could do lots of people a world of
good.

The Community of Scholars, which I'm about halfway through, is
Goodman's ideal of the University as a self-governing community, a free and
voluntary association with an essentially international, essentially anarchist
character. I think the experience of most college students in America circa
2006 reflects this ideal by negating almost every one of its elements. Still,
if this is a utopian pipe dream, it's an extremely sympathetic one. And on
reflection, my college experience did sometimes feel a little like this.
Probably because I spent much more time in coffee houses, playing ultimate, and
binge drinking with brilliant maniacs than I did maintaining a respectable
GPA.

I'm dead serious about that last sentence. My Bachelor of Arts in History
has so far served no other purpose than as a receipt, printed on very nice
paper, for a staggering amount of debt. On the other hand, the particulars of
the time I spent acquiring it — the dorms, bars, frisbees, classes
utterly irrelevant to my major, etc. — gave me a community and a voice,
and opened me to most of the meaningful experiences and relationships I have
had outside of my family. My community may have been flawed. Its members were
intensely self medicating, usually far from self-supporting, and often entirely
self-deluded — but they were also connected to a life of the mind,
international in outlook, and engaged in communication.

I think that much of what accounts for my reeling sense of alienation and
dislocation in this civilization, a sense that I keep seeing in people my age,
is that those of us who went to college are severing ourselves from the
communities we found there, or watching them disintegrate as our friends &
acquaintances follow their own trajectories and diminish under the pressures of
employment & marriage, the grinding transition to a fully compromised mode
of life.